


Of Phoenixes and Dragons and the Spaces In-Between

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Fortnight 2014 [17]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Amestris, F/F, Prompt Fic, Xing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:00:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The two masks were made of polished lacquer, wood cut down from trees on the foothills of the southern mountains known in Xijing as the Longji, the Dragon’s Spine, and in her native tongue the Ura-Kasa, the Mother Mountains, and painted high in the branches of the spined denizens of the forests by dyes and oils mixed from sacred herbs and berries, from applications of the divine fluids of beasts or the various hued silts and clays prescribed by the ancient recipes.</p><p>-</p><p>In which Lan Fan is yin, is yang, is maybe both. But fortunately May is here to help her through her conundrum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Phoenixes and Dragons and the Spaces In-Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FalconKnightCordelia](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=FalconKnightCordelia).



> Written for FMA Week 2014. Prompt 10-A: "Yin and Yang". Also written for FKC begging me to do a May Fan yin and yang prompt. So it worked out perfectly.
> 
> Lan Fan is a trans woman, as most of you probably already know, in my headcanons.
> 
> Unedited/unbeta'd/etc. Enjoy!

The two masks were made of polished lacquer, wood cut down from trees on the foothills of the southern mountains known in Xijing as the Longji, the Dragon’s Spine, and in her native tongue the _Ura-Kasa_ , the Mother Mountains, and painted high in the branches of the spined denizens of the forests by dyes and oils mixed from sacred herbs and berries, from applications of the divine fluids of beasts or the various hued silts and clays prescribed by the ancient recipes.

Though the memories of her childhood—filtered through years of life in a capital of arrogant peacocks and haughty nightingales in sharp contrast to the ripped-wing bloodied-talons bird of prey that pounded through her blood and soared through her nighttime wanderings—had faded, like an inked letter read and reread, folded and refolded, one too many times, she could recall the sharp pungency of the freshly carved wood, the bitter acridity of the recently finished paint.

“I shall take on the yang,” her grandfather told her, his beard not yet gone fully grey but already silvering at the tips. “And you, Lan Fan, shall take on the yin.”

She nodded. “Thank you, _shifu_.”

The yin. The feminine; the night; the north. Cool and wet, entirely mortal, crafted from the secrets of the shadows and the darkness, born of the earth and the seas. Like in the stories of the god of the skies and heavens who gave His life to help humanity, who lay upon the barren land to form the Longji with the ridged back of His spine, who wept into the empty basin below to form the Longlei with the salty droplets of His tears.

Of course, she’d only hear those legends after her father transferred their family to Xijing, to serve the Yao, as though the years she’d spent learning the forests of her youth meant nothing as long as the Fifty Clans attained their vassals and their retainers.

For now she listened to the word over and over again. Turned it over in her mind, like a precious gemstone she’d found in the dirt and brushed free from dust. _Yin. You, Lan Fan, shall take on the yin_.

Lan Fan. The name that would replace the one she had carried since her birth. As the years grew long she would come to push her true name from her mind, to take on the title of _Lan Fan_ , to forget the past that she’d once possessed.

She no longer remained the girl from the nomads of the _Ura-Kasa_ , her life one of the wind and the grasslands; she had slipped on a gown of sable, wrapped the fabric tightly around her body, become one with the shadow at the Yao’s feet.

 

When she entered the palace for the first time and stared at the brilliance of the multicoloured robes, sashes, dresses that marked each of the Fifty Clans from the lightest of pinks to the darkest of violets and spanning every colour combination in-between, she thought she might weep: She could scarcely recall the colours of the Yao and here she had to memorise fifty, some of which looked so remarkably similar that she suspected they had consolidated their fabric dyes for a cheaper pool. Not that she could judge the nobility.

Her grandfather held her hand tightly.

The archway leading to the Yao quarters blazed with a carved relief of a phoenix. “The sigil of the Yao,” her grandfather whispered; she dipped her head and smiled, grateful for the protection of the mask. For that was another mark of yin. The _feng_. The phoenix.

The firebird that raised itself from the ashes of its weakness to burn once more, to set the skies ablaze.

The patriarch of the Yao and the prince—traditionally, the Emperor’s wife-who-had-born-the-prince would also be present, but the birth of the prince had taken from her the final dregs of her life—wore a bright saffron that burned her eyes even for the mask darkening her vision.

“Prince Yao.”  Her grandfather bowed; she followed suit, arching her back until her forehead nearly touched the floor, her arms at her sides, her hands balled into fists at her thighs. “It is these ones’ pleasure to serve you.”

 

But the Yao, too, posed a conundrum, an enigma. For despite the femininity and the yin associated with the phoenix, the phoenix of the Yao burned in shades of gold and yellow as hot and bright as the sun that rolled through the sky. As if the yin and the yang had mixed in the middle, somehow. Meddled.

Like the paints and dyes that traced the wooden patterns of her mask in black and white and red. In yin and yang and wuji.

 

Meeting the princess—entirely almost by chance under the sterile lights of the doctor’s makeshift hospital in the forests—proved far more difficult than she had previously thought possible: The flying fury of bright pink from the Chang, the lowest Clan of the Fifty which _still_ managed to rear disrespectfully to the world by adopting the sigil of the dragon, usually reserved for the symbol of the Emperor, although the Chang dragon could be likened better to a salamander burst into life in sound and light and _pure infuriation_.

Lan Fan spent the better part of the first few nights in the gracious Dr Knox’s home struggling not to impale the princess on a kunai or slit her in half entirely from her throat downwards, as Lan Fan had been taught to gut felled animals.

“You’re an _idiot_ who serves an _idiot prince_!” May remarked during breakfast. Xiao Mei yipped. Lan Fan’s right eye twitched.

“You’re a loud little girl clearly suffering from an excess of yang,” the retainer snapped in turn. “Running around by yourself, screaming at everything and everyone, thinking that you can win the throne by meddling in the affairs of a country that isn’t even your own.”

The princess snorted. “Oh! As if passively waiting around like the idiot prince’s precious little _shadow_ is any better? At least I’m fighting hard for myself. You’re just sitting listening to whatever your little _Ling_ begs you to do, huh? You’d probably jump off of a bridge if you thought it’d make him laugh!”

She bristled. “The young lord never be amused at my suffering! Take that back!”

The doctor sighed, rubbed his temples. “Girls, girls, _please_.”

Turning her head away lest the princess catch sight, Lan Fan allowed herself a small smile. _Girls_. The doctor understood.

 

Yet one cannot stay within one room with a single individual forever and not soften one’s façade, even the tiniest sliver of the glacier melting at their foot. And so, little by little, in the confines of of the dark house in the midst of a foreign country whose language twisted their mouths into strange shapes and roughened their throats going down, the silence between the princess and the retainer shattered.

The yin and the yang flowed to the centre. Pooled in the spaces between their hands. Between the fingers of Lan Fan’s right and those of May’s left.

The princess would kneel at the retainer’s left side, gently circumscribe the array on her shoulder, and activate the blued lightning. The pain lifted, and Lan Fan gasped out.

May beamed.

After months of Amestrisian, the familiar tones of the Xingese dialects loosened their lips. They whispered stories to one another, of their childhood, of their peoples. May nodded at the explanations of Lan Fan’s youth amongst the huntsmen of the southern mountains; Lan Fan listened to May’s oral narration of the history of the Chang. In the quiet stretches that dappled their conversations Lan Fan sensed May’s heartbeat, so close that she thought she might be able to raise her hand and touch the palpable drum that thrummed away through the very air.

She wondered how it would feel under her fingers. May’s chest, where her heart sat at her breast.

The thought flushed her face with heat and she clamped her hand over her mouth, kicking the mattress with her feet. May, asleep on her other side, lifted her head drowsily. Without the bands in her hair that clasped her locks together, her hair framed her face in frizzed wisps of black. “Lan Fan? Is something wrong?”

“No,” Lan Fan whispered, concealing her grin behind a mask not of wood but of a tight grip on the emotions of her face. “Nothing at all.”

 

She watched her grandfather die. She watched her yang bleed out on the rooftop bathed by the relentless sun that burned away the edge of summer. She watched the damned homunculus Wrath stab one of the only three souls in the world that mattered to her, and at the end of it all—when her grandfather ran out of breaths, when the man from Briggs gasped his last—the homunculus escaped into from the mountains to the seas.

The seas. Her tears. The Longlei, opened out before her, the ocean monsoons thundering in the distance.

The _Ekya-Tosa_. The Father Seas.

She caught Ling’s hand, kept him from falling into the seas of tears, and leaped herself. Found the homunculus. Wrath. The same wrath that boiled through her veins, that boiled through the veins of the scarred Ishvalan who wrote his brother’s words in his own blood until the vengeance whispered languidly from their arteries, drained to the bases of their feet and ebbed outwards.

Peace.

The homunculus died in peace and she failed her grandfather, failed her country, failed her _self_. Her grandfather had told her—had promised her— _you, Lan Fan, shall take on the yin_ —and yet—

Yin. Not aggressive, not fiery, not willing to murder and kill and draw blood from eve those who deserved it worst of all.

And then, May. Who sacrificed her throne, who gave up the philosopher’s stone, who saved the life of a woman she barely knew and who dismantled whatever chance she had of becoming Empress in favour of not letting _anyone_ suffer.

Not like yang at all. Like yin. But also yang, and yin, at the same time. Perhaps Lan Fan, too, could be both. When she touched her hands together her fingers were steel and flesh.

Yin and yang. The moon and the sun. Dark and light, day and night, the earth and the wind, the seas and the heavens. The phoenix _and_ the dragon.

The phoenix of the Yao. The dragon of the Chang.

 

On the route back to Xing, Lan Fan carried her grandfather’s body until her arms tired and threatened to give and until the broken automail—pulled out from its port during the fighting on the Promised Day—sagged in her left shoulder. Her nerves sang with her agony.

Ling and May folded their arms across their chest with the exact same tilt of the head and narrowing of the eyes. Lan Fan bit her tongue to keep from crying and laughing at once. While Ling took up the body of the man who had protected him for so long, May healed Lan Fan’s shoulder as best she could beneath the unyielding sun bearing down upon them with its rays of gold. Shielding her eyes against the light, she glanced down at the alkahetrist drawing the array on her shoulder. The dark braids, outlined in gold.

Yin and yang.

Her stomach clenched. Her throat burned. Her fingers found May’s hips. Just as the princess lifted her gaze to Lan Fan’s, she whispered:

“Can I kiss you?”

May blinked. Her eyelashes glistened gold in the sunlight when she tossed her head back, braids coiling behind her head, and laughed, loud and long and clear.

“I thought,” she murmured, cradling Lan Fan’s lower jaw, “that you’d never ask.”


End file.
